Why I left Google and started working for myself
For the past four years, I’ve been working as a software developer at Google, but I quit February 1 because they didn’t give me a Christmas present.
Just kidding, it's actually a bit more complicated.
The first two years I loved google.
')
When asked at the annual survey of employees whether I see myself in Google after five years, I answered “of course, without options.”
Well, of course I will be on Google in five years. I am surrounded by the best engineers in the world, I use the most advanced development tools in the world and I eat the most free food in the world.
My usual day at google.
- More cake, Mr. Programmer? It is free in any quantity.
- Not today, Pierre. I'm late for a massage, it is also free.
My last performance rating read: "Much beyond expectations." If I just continue in the same vein, then soon I will be promoted to lead software engineer (senior). How does this sound! Throughout my career I will be able to say: “Yes, I was a lead software engineer. In Google. Everyone will be so impressed.
My manager assured that the boost is close. In his opinion, I am ready. All you need is the right project to show to the promotion committee.
No, Google managers cannot promote their direct employees. They do not even have the right to vote.
Instead, decisions are made by a small committee of software engineers and senior managers who have never heard of you until the day they decide on your promotion.
You submit an application, collect a “promo package”: a selection of written recommendations from colleagues, documents on your projects - and write a mini-essay where you explain why your work deserves a boost.
The committee then reviews your package along with several others, and the whole day they decide who gets promoted and who won't.
During my two year honeymoon this system seemed great. Of course , the fate of the candidate should be in the hands of a mysterious committee that has never seen this person. They are not subject to nepotism or intrigue. They will look at my achievements - and appreciate the high-quality code and insightful engineering solutions.
Before I collected my first promotional package, I never thought about the mechanism, how it all works.
In my head, the promotion committee was a kind of all-knowing and fair organization. If every day I choose the right problems to solve, improve the code base and help the team work effectively, the committee will magically recognize this and reward me.
Not surprisingly, the system did not work that way. It took me two years to figure it out.
My primary responsibility at that time was legacy pipeline data. For many years it was in maintenance mode, but the load increased - and the conveyor was under pressure. He often died quietly or gave out incorrect data. It took several days to diagnose crashes, because no one has written documentation since the initial design specification.
I brought the conveyor back to life with pride and love. Corrected dozens of errors and wrote automatic tests to ensure that they do not appear again. Removed thousands of lines of code that was either not used or subject to replacement with modern libraries. I documented the pipeline, so that corporate knowledge was available to colleagues, and not stored only in my head.
As it turned out when reviewing my application for promotion, all these are not quantitative metrics. I could not prove that it had a positive effect on Google.
Legacy data conveyor does not generate many metrics. Those who were, showed as if the deterioration in performance. Due to the bugs I discovered, the number of bugs in the system has increased. The number of failures also increased, because I programmed the system for a quick failure with anomalies, and not a silent transfer of corrupted data. I drastically reduced the time to eliminate failures, but there were no metrics that track the time spent by developers.
My other work didn’t look good on paper either. Several times I put aside my projects for several weeks or even months to help a teammate who rested on deadline. It was the right decision for the team, but it looked doubtful in the promotional package. For the promotion committee, my teammate’s project looked like a big, important job that required the participation of several developers. If they have involved me in their work, then this speaks of their strong leadership qualities. And I am just a meaningless batrac, whose own work is so irrelevant that it can be immediately put off on any demand.
I presented my first promotional package - and I received the answer I was afraid of: the promotion committee said that my ability to cope with technical difficulties was not proven and they see no benefit to Google.
Discussion of my case in the promotion committee.
- I wrote documentation on this component, which no one understood how to use.
- Anyone can write documentation. What metrics show benefits for Google?
- This unnecessary code constantly broke our build. I spent two weeks cleaning it up.
- Everyone can remove the code, and only truly worthy promotions can write it.
“No one dared to try out a new feature that Dave rolled out, so I wrote a couple of end-to-end tests.
- This is worth raising!
“Certificate for promotion FOR DEYVA, who boldly released a new feature without end-to-end tests”
Failure was a heavy blow, but did not break me. I felt that I was working above my current level, but the promotion committee does not see this. It can be fixed.
I decided that in the first couple of years I was too naive. I didn’t plan enough and didn’t make sure that my work left a paper trail. Now that I understand the system, I can continue to do the same good work, only by improving the accounting.
For example, my team received a lot of distracting email alerts due to false alarms. Before, I would just fix it. But now I knew: for the work to appear in my promotional package, I must first set up the metrics so that we have historical records of the frequency of alerts. By the time the case is considered, I will have an impressive schedule for reducing the number of alerts.
Soon after, I was assigned a project. It seemed to be meant for promotion. The system strongly involved machine learning, which was and remains a hot topic in Google. It automated the work that hundreds of people-operators did manually, so that it would demonstrate clear, objective benefits for Google. In addition, a novice (joon) comes to my submission for the duration of the entire project. This is usually considered an additional trump card in the promotion committee.
A few months later, Google hit the headlines when it announced it was abandoning a long tradition of giving generous Christmas presents to all employees. Instead, they spent the gift budget for the purchase ofadvertising, disguised as charity "Chromebooks" for disadvantaged students.
Soon I heard such a conversation between two employees:
Wait a second. So this is my business relationship with Google.
It may seem strange that it took me two and a half years to understand this. But Google is really effectively trying to create an atmosphere of a unified community. It makes us feel that we are not just employees, that we are Google.
That conversation made me realize that I was not Google. I provide paid services for Google.
So if we have a business relationship with Google that should serve the interests of both parties, why waste time on all these tasks that serve the interests of Google and not my own? If the promotion committee doesn't reward bug fixing or team support, why am I doing this?
My first refusal to promote taught me the wrong lesson. I thought I could continue to do the same work, but beautifully present it to the committee. In fact, I had to do the opposite: find out what the promotion committee wanted - and deal exclusively with this.
I adopted a new strategy. Before starting any task, I asked the question: will this help my career development? If not, I did not do it.
My quality bar for the code dropped from the level of “Will we be able to maintain it for the next five years?” To “Will it stretch to my promotion?” I did not report errors and did not correct them if they did not put my project at risk. I avoided all maintenance duties. I stopped working as a volunteer on campus recruiting days. I reduced the number of interviews from one or two per week to zero.
Priorities have changed. The management transferred my project to another subsidiary team in India. In exchange, she gave us one of her projects. It was an undocumented system on an outdated infrastructure, with the most important component in production. I was instructed to release the system from the Indian team code and transfer it to the new framework, continuously maintaining the production status in production and increasing the performance indicators.
As for promotion, this is a retreat a few months ago. Because for two months I did not give anything in the canceled project, so the months spent were useless. It will take weeks to speed up the system that was inherited by me, and I could lose a few more months to maintain it in working condition.
For the third time in six months, the manager reassigned me to the middle of the project. Each time he assured that this had nothing to do with the quality of my work, but rather to some shifts in the strategy of top management or the size of the team.
This time I decided to step back and evaluate how everything looks from the outside. Forget about your manager, his managers, the promotion committee. What if you just leave me and Google? What happens in our “business relationship”?
Well, Google continues to tell me that it cannot judge my work until it sees the completed project. Meanwhile, I cannot complete any project because Google interrupts them halfway and assigns new ones.
The situation became absurd.
The Google promotion committee approach to book publishing.
“At the beginning of the book, they learned how to animate dinosaurs with restored DNA.”
- wow!
- And then the velociraptor opens the door to the kitchen!
- Oh no! I dropped the pencils, can you collect them, please?
- As I said…
- No, you have to start a new story. This was interrupted, so I have no idea about your literary abilities.
My career depended on a changeable anonymous committee that gave me one hour of its time. Independent of my management decisions erased the months of my career.
Worst of all, I was not proud of my work. Instead of asking the question: “How to solve a difficult problem?”, I asked: “How to make the problem look difficult for promotion?” This is disgusting.
Even if I get a promotion, what then? It is said that every new advance is exponentially more difficult than the previous one. To continue my career, I need even more ambitious projects, including cooperation with a large number of partner teams. But it simply meant that the project could fail due to even more factors beyond my control, erasing the months or years of my life.
Around this time, I discovered Indie Hackers .
Screenshot of Indie Hackers website
This is an online community for the founders of small software businesses. The key word is "small." This is not the future Zuckerberg, but those who want to build a modest profitable business, giving a livelihood.
I was always interested in the possibility of creating my own software company, but I represented only the variant of the foundation of a startup in Silicon Valley. I thought that the founder of such a company spends most of the time searching for investments, and the rest on how to attract the next million users.
Indie hackers are a tempting alternative. Most of them built a business on their own savings or as side projects in their free time from the main work. They did not seek investors and, of course, did not prove their worth before anonymous committees.
Of course, there are downsides. Their income is less steady, and there are more different catastrophic risks. If I ever make a mistake in Google, which will cost the company $ 10 million, I will not experience any consequences. I will be asked to write a document analyzing post-mortem events - and everyone will be happy with the lesson learned. For most independent founders, an error of $ 10 million means business ruin and debt repayment over several lives.
Members of the Indie Hackers community captivated me because they are in complete control of the situation. Regardless of whether the business has experienced rampant success or years of stagnation, they remain paramount. At Google, I didn’t even control my own projects, not to mention my career growth or management of my team.
I thought about it for several months and finally made up my mind. I wanted to be an indie hacker.
I still had unfinished business on Google. Having spent three years trying to raise, I hated the idea of leaving with nothing, without a single completed case. Only a few months left before the date when I could re-apply for a raise, so I decided to try again.
Six weeks before this date, my project was canceled. Again.
Actually, my whole team was canceled. This is a fairly common phenomenon in Google, for which there is a euphemism: defragmentation. The management handed over the projects of my team to another subsidiary team in India. My colleagues and I had to start all over again in different divisions of the company.
I still applied for promotion. A few weeks later, my manager read me the results. My performance rating was Excellent, the highest possible, which only about 5% of employees receive per cycle. The Promotion Committee noted that over the past six months I have clearly demonstrated work at the “senora” level. In fact, during these months I have been engaged in the optimization of metrics for improvement.
But they expressed the feeling that six months is not long enough, so ... good luck next time.
The manager said that I have high chances of improvement after six months if I work in the same quality manner. I can’t say that it didn’t sound seductive, but by that moment I had heard the words about “a great chance for a rise in six months” in the last two years.
It's time to leave.
When I tell people that I quit Google, they assume that I have a brilliant startup idea. Only an idiot will leave such a well-paid job as a software engineer at Google.
But I'm really an idiot with no ideas.
My plan is to try different projects for several months and see which one of them hits a wave, for example:
Google was a great place to work, and I learned many valuable skills there. It was hard to leave, because there was still so much to learn. But employers like Google will always remain, and I will not always have the freedom to start my own company. Therefore, I look forward to where this path leads me.
There is information that Google employees who leave the company (for example, to try their hand at start-ups) can easily return and easily get a previous job for several years, so people like the author of this article risk practically nothing. Although one should take into account that the criticism expressed by him may influence the decision of the company to accept it back. - approx. per.
Just kidding, it's actually a bit more complicated.
First two years
The first two years I loved google.
')
When asked at the annual survey of employees whether I see myself in Google after five years, I answered “of course, without options.”
Well, of course I will be on Google in five years. I am surrounded by the best engineers in the world, I use the most advanced development tools in the world and I eat the most free food in the world.
My usual day at google.
- More cake, Mr. Programmer? It is free in any quantity.
- Not today, Pierre. I'm late for a massage, it is also free.
My last performance rating read: "Much beyond expectations." If I just continue in the same vein, then soon I will be promoted to lead software engineer (senior). How does this sound! Throughout my career I will be able to say: “Yes, I was a lead software engineer. In Google. Everyone will be so impressed.
My manager assured that the boost is close. In his opinion, I am ready. All you need is the right project to show to the promotion committee.
Your manager is not promoting you?
No, Google managers cannot promote their direct employees. They do not even have the right to vote.
Instead, decisions are made by a small committee of software engineers and senior managers who have never heard of you until the day they decide on your promotion.
You submit an application, collect a “promo package”: a selection of written recommendations from colleagues, documents on your projects - and write a mini-essay where you explain why your work deserves a boost.
The committee then reviews your package along with several others, and the whole day they decide who gets promoted and who won't.
During my two year honeymoon this system seemed great. Of course , the fate of the candidate should be in the hands of a mysterious committee that has never seen this person. They are not subject to nepotism or intrigue. They will look at my achievements - and appreciate the high-quality code and insightful engineering solutions.
The system works differently
Before I collected my first promotional package, I never thought about the mechanism, how it all works.
In my head, the promotion committee was a kind of all-knowing and fair organization. If every day I choose the right problems to solve, improve the code base and help the team work effectively, the committee will magically recognize this and reward me.
Not surprisingly, the system did not work that way. It took me two years to figure it out.
Naive simpleton at work
My primary responsibility at that time was legacy pipeline data. For many years it was in maintenance mode, but the load increased - and the conveyor was under pressure. He often died quietly or gave out incorrect data. It took several days to diagnose crashes, because no one has written documentation since the initial design specification.
I brought the conveyor back to life with pride and love. Corrected dozens of errors and wrote automatic tests to ensure that they do not appear again. Removed thousands of lines of code that was either not used or subject to replacement with modern libraries. I documented the pipeline, so that corporate knowledge was available to colleagues, and not stored only in my head.
As it turned out when reviewing my application for promotion, all these are not quantitative metrics. I could not prove that it had a positive effect on Google.
Or metrics or nothing
Legacy data conveyor does not generate many metrics. Those who were, showed as if the deterioration in performance. Due to the bugs I discovered, the number of bugs in the system has increased. The number of failures also increased, because I programmed the system for a quick failure with anomalies, and not a silent transfer of corrupted data. I drastically reduced the time to eliminate failures, but there were no metrics that track the time spent by developers.
My other work didn’t look good on paper either. Several times I put aside my projects for several weeks or even months to help a teammate who rested on deadline. It was the right decision for the team, but it looked doubtful in the promotional package. For the promotion committee, my teammate’s project looked like a big, important job that required the participation of several developers. If they have involved me in their work, then this speaks of their strong leadership qualities. And I am just a meaningless batrac, whose own work is so irrelevant that it can be immediately put off on any demand.
I presented my first promotional package - and I received the answer I was afraid of: the promotion committee said that my ability to cope with technical difficulties was not proven and they see no benefit to Google.
Discussion of my case in the promotion committee.
- I wrote documentation on this component, which no one understood how to use.
- Anyone can write documentation. What metrics show benefits for Google?
- This unnecessary code constantly broke our build. I spent two weeks cleaning it up.
- Everyone can remove the code, and only truly worthy promotions can write it.
“No one dared to try out a new feature that Dave rolled out, so I wrote a couple of end-to-end tests.
- This is worth raising!
“Certificate for promotion FOR DEYVA, who boldly released a new feature without end-to-end tests”
Conclusions
Failure was a heavy blow, but did not break me. I felt that I was working above my current level, but the promotion committee does not see this. It can be fixed.
I decided that in the first couple of years I was too naive. I didn’t plan enough and didn’t make sure that my work left a paper trail. Now that I understand the system, I can continue to do the same good work, only by improving the accounting.
For example, my team received a lot of distracting email alerts due to false alarms. Before, I would just fix it. But now I knew: for the work to appear in my promotional package, I must first set up the metrics so that we have historical records of the frequency of alerts. By the time the case is considered, I will have an impressive schedule for reducing the number of alerts.
Soon after, I was assigned a project. It seemed to be meant for promotion. The system strongly involved machine learning, which was and remains a hot topic in Google. It automated the work that hundreds of people-operators did manually, so that it would demonstrate clear, objective benefits for Google. In addition, a novice (joon) comes to my submission for the duration of the entire project. This is usually considered an additional trump card in the promotion committee.
Christmas Gifts and Awakening
A few months later, Google hit the headlines when it announced it was abandoning a long tradition of giving generous Christmas presents to all employees. Instead, they spent the gift budget for the purchase of
Soon I heard such a conversation between two employees:
Officer A : in fact, you still get a gift. Such cost reductions increase the value of Google shares. You can sell your stock and buy any gift.
Officer B : what if I told my wife that I did not buy her a Christmas present, but she could use the money in our bank account and buy a present, which one would she like?
Officer A : You are in a business relationship with Google. If you are disappointed that Google does not behave "romantically" and does not give you gifts like you did for your wife, then you have a mistaken idea about relationships.
Wait a second. So this is my business relationship with Google.
It may seem strange that it took me two and a half years to understand this. But Google is really effectively trying to create an atmosphere of a unified community. It makes us feel that we are not just employees, that we are Google.
That conversation made me realize that I was not Google. I provide paid services for Google.
So if we have a business relationship with Google that should serve the interests of both parties, why waste time on all these tasks that serve the interests of Google and not my own? If the promotion committee doesn't reward bug fixing or team support, why am I doing this?
Optimization to improve
My first refusal to promote taught me the wrong lesson. I thought I could continue to do the same work, but beautifully present it to the committee. In fact, I had to do the opposite: find out what the promotion committee wanted - and deal exclusively with this.
I adopted a new strategy. Before starting any task, I asked the question: will this help my career development? If not, I did not do it.
My quality bar for the code dropped from the level of “Will we be able to maintain it for the next five years?” To “Will it stretch to my promotion?” I did not report errors and did not correct them if they did not put my project at risk. I avoided all maintenance duties. I stopped working as a volunteer on campus recruiting days. I reduced the number of interviews from one or two per week to zero.
Then my project was canceled.
Priorities have changed. The management transferred my project to another subsidiary team in India. In exchange, she gave us one of her projects. It was an undocumented system on an outdated infrastructure, with the most important component in production. I was instructed to release the system from the Indian team code and transfer it to the new framework, continuously maintaining the production status in production and increasing the performance indicators.
As for promotion, this is a retreat a few months ago. Because for two months I did not give anything in the canceled project, so the months spent were useless. It will take weeks to speed up the system that was inherited by me, and I could lose a few more months to maintain it in working condition.
What do I do?
For the third time in six months, the manager reassigned me to the middle of the project. Each time he assured that this had nothing to do with the quality of my work, but rather to some shifts in the strategy of top management or the size of the team.
This time I decided to step back and evaluate how everything looks from the outside. Forget about your manager, his managers, the promotion committee. What if you just leave me and Google? What happens in our “business relationship”?
Well, Google continues to tell me that it cannot judge my work until it sees the completed project. Meanwhile, I cannot complete any project because Google interrupts them halfway and assigns new ones.
The situation became absurd.
The Google promotion committee approach to book publishing.
“At the beginning of the book, they learned how to animate dinosaurs with restored DNA.”
- wow!
- And then the velociraptor opens the door to the kitchen!
- Oh no! I dropped the pencils, can you collect them, please?
- As I said…
- No, you have to start a new story. This was interrupted, so I have no idea about your literary abilities.
My career depended on a changeable anonymous committee that gave me one hour of its time. Independent of my management decisions erased the months of my career.
Worst of all, I was not proud of my work. Instead of asking the question: “How to solve a difficult problem?”, I asked: “How to make the problem look difficult for promotion?” This is disgusting.
Even if I get a promotion, what then? It is said that every new advance is exponentially more difficult than the previous one. To continue my career, I need even more ambitious projects, including cooperation with a large number of partner teams. But it simply meant that the project could fail due to even more factors beyond my control, erasing the months or years of my life.
What is the alternative?
Around this time, I discovered Indie Hackers .
Screenshot of Indie Hackers website
This is an online community for the founders of small software businesses. The key word is "small." This is not the future Zuckerberg, but those who want to build a modest profitable business, giving a livelihood.
I was always interested in the possibility of creating my own software company, but I represented only the variant of the foundation of a startup in Silicon Valley. I thought that the founder of such a company spends most of the time searching for investments, and the rest on how to attract the next million users.
Indie hackers are a tempting alternative. Most of them built a business on their own savings or as side projects in their free time from the main work. They did not seek investors and, of course, did not prove their worth before anonymous committees.
Of course, there are downsides. Their income is less steady, and there are more different catastrophic risks. If I ever make a mistake in Google, which will cost the company $ 10 million, I will not experience any consequences. I will be asked to write a document analyzing post-mortem events - and everyone will be happy with the lesson learned. For most independent founders, an error of $ 10 million means business ruin and debt repayment over several lives.
Members of the Indie Hackers community captivated me because they are in complete control of the situation. Regardless of whether the business has experienced rampant success or years of stagnation, they remain paramount. At Google, I didn’t even control my own projects, not to mention my career growth or management of my team.
I thought about it for several months and finally made up my mind. I wanted to be an indie hacker.
Last before you leave
I still had unfinished business on Google. Having spent three years trying to raise, I hated the idea of leaving with nothing, without a single completed case. Only a few months left before the date when I could re-apply for a raise, so I decided to try again.
Six weeks before this date, my project was canceled. Again.
Actually, my whole team was canceled. This is a fairly common phenomenon in Google, for which there is a euphemism: defragmentation. The management handed over the projects of my team to another subsidiary team in India. My colleagues and I had to start all over again in different divisions of the company.
I still applied for promotion. A few weeks later, my manager read me the results. My performance rating was Excellent, the highest possible, which only about 5% of employees receive per cycle. The Promotion Committee noted that over the past six months I have clearly demonstrated work at the “senora” level. In fact, during these months I have been engaged in the optimization of metrics for improvement.
But they expressed the feeling that six months is not long enough, so ... good luck next time.
The manager said that I have high chances of improvement after six months if I work in the same quality manner. I can’t say that it didn’t sound seductive, but by that moment I had heard the words about “a great chance for a rise in six months” in the last two years.
It's time to leave.
What's next?
When I tell people that I quit Google, they assume that I have a brilliant startup idea. Only an idiot will leave such a well-paid job as a software engineer at Google.
But I'm really an idiot with no ideas.
My plan is to try different projects for several months and see which one of them hits a wave, for example:
- Keep working on KetoHub and try to make it profitable.
- Create a business based on SIA, distributed storage technology, which I often wrote about .
- Spend more time writing articles and look for options to make money on it.
Google was a great place to work, and I learned many valuable skills there. It was hard to leave, because there was still so much to learn. But employers like Google will always remain, and I will not always have the freedom to start my own company. Therefore, I look forward to where this path leads me.
There is information that Google employees who leave the company (for example, to try their hand at start-ups) can easily return and easily get a previous job for several years, so people like the author of this article risk practically nothing. Although one should take into account that the criticism expressed by him may influence the decision of the company to accept it back. - approx. per.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/350374/
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